Oversight is usually designed around a simple assumption: people behave better when they know someone is watching.
Governments build entire integrity systems around this principle. Financial interests are disclosed. Procurement decisions are reviewed. Audits test whether rules have been followed. Ethics officers monitor conduct, while complaints and investigations provide another layer of accountability when something goes wrong.
But effective oversight creates its own governance problem.
Too little monitoring can leave misconduct undetected. Too much can create expensive compliance systems, weaken professional autonomy and signal that institutions do not trust the people working inside them.
New research suggests there may be another mechanism worth considering.
A field experiment involving 2,983 public-sector workers found that simply giving people the choice to be monitored changed how honestly they behaved.
Researchers created an opportunity to cheat
The study, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, examined public-sector workers in the United States using a controlled dice-roll experiment.
Participants completed a task where reporting a higher number could produce a greater financial reward.
In the private condition, researchers could not see the actual result of an individual’s roll. That meant a participant could report a higher number without being caught.
Researchers could not identify which particular individuals were dishonest. Instead, they could detect dishonesty statistically across the group because completely honest dice rolls should produce a predictable average.
The results were then compared with an earlier experiment using the same approach among the wider US population.
When participants were not monitored, public-sector workers reported results consistent with greater honesty than the general population.
That was only the first finding.
Most public-sector workers chose oversight
Another group was given a choice.
They could complete the task privately or use a system where the result would be visible to the researchers.
A large majority of the public-sector workers voluntarily chose the monitored option.
Those who did so behaved more honestly.
The earlier general-population experiment had produced a similar response to voluntary monitoring. Once participants opted into oversight, the original difference in honesty between the public-sector group and the broader population disappeared.
That changes the governance interpretation of the study.
The interesting finding is not simply that public servants behaved more honestly in an experimental task.
It is that institutional design changed behaviour.
Oversight can work before misconduct occurs
Traditional accountability systems frequently operate after something has already happened.
An audit discovers an irregular payment. An investigation follows a complaint. A disciplinary process begins after misconduct has been identified.
Preventative governance works differently.
Its objective is to create conditions in which inappropriate behaviour becomes less likely in the first place.
The experiment offers a small example of how that can happen. Participants did not need to be secretly watched or subjected to an elaborate surveillance system. The existence of a visible monitoring option created an opportunity to demonstrate accountability voluntarily.
The researcher describes this as a form of opt-in monitoring.
It is closely related to behavioural approaches to public policy, where relatively small changes to the way choices are structured can influence behaviour without removing people’s freedom to choose.
For institutions, the attraction is obvious. Monitoring every decision can be expensive. Designing systems that make accountability visible and easy to accept may sometimes achieve part of the same objective with less intrusion.
South Africa already combines ethics and monitoring
The finding has particular relevance to how South Africa is attempting to strengthen integrity in the public service.
The country’s public-service ethics system does not rely on a single control.
Departments are required to appoint or designate ethics officers, while public servants operate under codes of conduct and financial-disclosure requirements. Lifestyle audits have also become part of the integrity framework for senior officials, alongside investigations, disciplinary mechanisms and the National Anti-Corruption Hotline.
This creates several layers of accountability.
Recent government reporting indicates that compliance with lifestyle audits among senior management reached 93% for the 2024/25 financial year, up from 61% when the requirements were introduced in 2023.
That improvement does not mean misconduct has disappeared, nor does the new international study prove that voluntary monitoring would produce the same result in South African departments.
It does, however, reinforce an important distinction.
Good governance is not created only by catching people who break rules.
It also depends on designing institutions that make ethical behaviour easier to demonstrate and harder to avoid.
Monitoring is not the same as institutional trust
There are limits to how far the experiment can be taken.
Rolling a die for a financial reward is very different from managing a government tender, declaring a conflict of interest or making a regulatory decision involving millions of rand.
The participants were also based in the United States, where administrative culture and institutional conditions differ from those in South Africa.
The study measures behaviour in a controlled experimental setting. It does not measure corruption across an entire public service.
Nor should voluntary oversight replace independent audits, investigations or enforcement where these are necessary.
Its contribution is narrower.
It suggests that accountability mechanisms can influence behaviour before enforcement becomes necessary, and that people may be more willing to accept visible oversight than institutions sometimes assume.
For governments, that turns monitoring from a purely policing question into an organisational-design question.
The strongest integrity systems may ultimately be those where accountability does not appear only when something goes wrong.
It is already built into the way ordinary decisions are made.
Source Information
Study Title: Nudging our better angels: are public sector workers more honest?
Author: Ching Leong
Journal: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Published: 21 July 2026
DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-08408-0
